If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

If you bump up the difficulty to hard or insane the regular bugs are much more resistant to flames. Flamer is still very useful to slow down bugs so that you can dance around them (i.e. kite) or just run past.

Flamer+Chainsaw tears though the game pretty much solo. Flamer is a bit too good.

For flamer, I think the big problem lies in its incredible ammo efficiency. 1 puff ignites any enemy and as a result also minimizes the chance for FF. If aliens took 3-4 puffs it wouldn't be so insanely ammo efficient and so incredibly FF safe. Eggs can stay at 1 puff to ignite. If I see noobs using it improperly (a short stream of flames) it tends to run out of ammo and be less of an ultimate weapon.

As it stands pretty much all the damage comes from the burn, 2 burns kills aliens on hard/insane, 1 burn on normal. While they burn they are no longer a threat. Make it take a little more effort to burn them and maybe give the flamer a point or two of damage to compensate.

As it stands pretty much all the damage comes from the burn, 2 burns kills aliens on hard/insane, 1 burn on normal. While they burn they are no longer a threat. Make it take a little more effort to burn them and maybe give the flamer a point or two of damage to compensate.

The Puffs just lower there health, until it reaches 0, and then then the burning to death animations is played (what makes them no more thread to any marine) but un Insane they can even go on and attack you when ignited.
As a solution, I would guess that Larios idea of the dmg over time ad not 1 puff = igniting a whole bunch of tarets is pretty good, as you would have to spray it into the hord to burn them and just dont tick them on fire and run aside them while they burn to death.

On harder difficulty, you can still run low/out of ammo pretty fast depending on how you use it. Spraying in squirts, or puffing is usually a good method and has been since the UT version, the aliens die in almost the same amount of time. In this version you have basically less room to move if there are plenty on fire already and kiting more than a dozen can lead to problems.

But even when they're lit up they can still pose a threat if you get too close or let a couple surround you so I don't think it's too over-powered. But I wouldn't mind if the damage was a bit more randomized per bug to offset how easy it is to predict which ones will drop giving you a clean path to kite the next one in and so on. The ammo count and reserve is fine, but randomizing the damage might be interesting.

IE: Initial firing has a guaranteed amount of damage, while just burning aliens not being fired on and burning take less damage at different rates. I guess it could be similar to how the pyro works with random criticals in TF2.

Another option could be to randomize swarm health. If you were to compare it to a real life, all things wouldn't be the same. One may be stronger than the other, or a little faster, or something similar. In this way, it would affect all weapons, and things couldn't always be predictable.

Personally I agree with the idea of making it take at least 4 puffs to ignite a drone or bigger. 1 can be enough for eggs an the flying things. Reason being it just feels a bit too safe right now to use the Flamethrower. I don't need to hardly pay attention. Even if I let a bug get right in my face one click an he an his friends were ignited an stunned long enough for me to just kite away. An I didn't even need to slow down to do this you can run full speed.

An like was said puffs will not light other Marines on fire. Making the weapon also safe from doing FF damage. Which should not be the case. IMO FF really should be the biggest potential drawback of this weapon. Then you wouldn't see all 4 running around abusing it that is for sure.

So yeah to summarize:

Require more flames to ignite medium an large enemies. Make it slow you down to shoot. If it feels too weak after this then buff burn damage some to compensate.

The great thing about the way this is released, that other than bug and possibly map pack support, its down to the community to run custom mods and servers to whatever people want, though its a shame we cannot use old patch versions(well it isnt yet anyway).

Personally I agree with the idea of making it take at least 4 puffs to ignite a drone or bigger. 1 can be enough for eggs an the flying things. Reason being it just feels a bit too safe right now to use the Flamethrower. I don't need to hardly pay attention. Even if I let a bug get right in my face one click an he an his friends were ignited an stunned long enough for me to just kite away. An I didn't even need to slow down to do this you can run full speed.

An like was said puffs will not light other Marines on fire. Making the weapon also safe from doing FF damage. Which should not be the case. IMO FF really should be the biggest potential drawback of this weapon. Then you wouldn't see all 4 running around abusing it that is for sure.

So yeah to summarize:

Require more flames to ignite medium an large enemies. Make it slow you down to shoot. If it feels too weak after this then buff burn damage some to compensate.

I think a better route would be to buff the actual flamethrower damage if it is too weak requiring multiple puffs to ignite things. Make +damage significant with the flamethrower.

I think it would be fine if it required 3-4 puffs to ignite things though.

It's nice as it is. At most, the addition of a, say maybe, 75% chance of ignition instead of 100%, could improve things imho. And while at it, I'd link difficulty level and enemy mass to ignition chance, say, bigger things take more hits to set ablaze.

Maybe the best solution would be if the devs changed the chance of ignition over time. So if you start with lets say 50% chance to ignite a drone, after 2 secondes of fire the chance is already at 80% so you have the effect of "burning" them, because you will do dmg, even if the don't burn. So they ether burn to death by your flames, or be themself, being ignited by you.

There's a few things I feel are a bit wrong with the flamethrower, one of the main things right now is that the burn counter is not reset after subsequent hits, making every hit past the first pretty much pointless. There's not much point to continually flame something if you've already set it on fire, and each burst does nothing to lengthen the burn time.

So because every burst after the first is pretty much pointless, you might as well just run around and let them chase you till the burn runs out, then puff them again. I've seen players continually flame a drone on insane, and then all of a sudden it's not on fire anymore - it just doesn't make sense.

On a more drastic note, I feel that the game simply handles the flamethrower wrong.

In my mind if I was using a flamethrower on something continuously it would do a lot more damage to it than just hitting it with a short puff. Right now, the game pretty much requires that you puff and run, rather than the more logical flame and kill.

What I'm saying basically, is that getting hit by the flamethrower should do more overall damage than the burning afterward.

In addition, getting hit by the flamethrower should slow down the alien, but if you stop before it's dead, the flames will make it frenzy and faster. This change would make Telsa a bit more unique as well.